Israel Boosts Defense Spending by 10%
Israel will increase its 2015 defense budget by 6 billion shekels ($1.6 billion) or more than 10 percent to 57 billion shekels, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The 50-day Gaza conflict which ended last month has underpinned hefty budget demands by the Defense Ministry.
With Israel also preparing for a possible confrontation with arch-foe Iran and trying to manage a weakening economy, the budget standoff had stirred speculation that Finance Minister Yair Lapid could quit the cabinet.
Lapid, a centrist partner in the conservative premier’s government, had balked at proposals for a bigger increase in defense funding, fearing knock-on tax hikes.
Netanyahu’s statement, issued after talks to head off a fiscal crisis in the governing coalition, said that in addition to increasing the defense budget by 6 billion shekels the government would pay out 7 to 8 billion shekels to cover the costs from the 50-day Gaza war.
“It was also decided that the deficit target for 2015 in the draft budget that will be brought before the cabinet will remain at 3.4 percent and will not include raising taxes,” the statement said.
The total outlay on the 2015 defense budget and Gaza war still falls about 8 percent short of the 70 billion shekels sought by the Defense Ministry.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO